To all of Gale's friends:




He's going to be okay.

Katniss wasn't quite sure how she ended up with another student in her little school of hunting. Already she'd been trying to teach her friend Madge how to use a bow and arrow, and now she had offered to do the same for Jake, passing along the skills her father had taught her to others. She wasn't quite sure she was the teaching type, really, but if it was what they wanted it was what she would try to do.

Madge wouldn't be joining them on this little lesson, though. Katniss wanted to keep her internet life and her personal life separate, even though Prim and Gale had both found the community on their own. She couldn't really control that, but she could at least avoid telling people her little secret.

Still, Katniss spent every day hunting. So no one found it weird when she went out to hunt again today, climbing under the fence surrounding the District to enter the forests. She waited patiently for Jake's arrival here, not wanting to show him the District or to explain where the outsider had come from.

I'm fine.





For anyone who's concerned or whatever else.


I'm. Fine.

The Hunger Games had stolen a lot of things from Katniss that she could never get back no matter how hard she struggled to. It had changed everything in her life in ways she didn't know how to cope with them all. She wasn't living in her old house, her mother had started to change, her relationship with Gale wasn't the same as it had been, Peeta was now a normal part of her life, she didn't hunt with Gale daily anymore...

The list went on. There wasn't one aspect of her life that the Games hadn't changed.

Except maybe the cat. She still hated the cat.

But Sundays were different. Sundays were her days to pretend that life was the way it used to be. That people still depended on her hunting and not her money. That Gale and her were okay... It was a day to just be the old Katniss again. Not this... hero that people kept trying to make her out to be.

She left before Gale did, since she had all of every day to relax and Gale only had Sunday to catch up on the rest he was denied of with his line of work. So she let him sleep, leaving him things at the edge of the forest to grab before her came in to meet her.

As for Katniss. She was already deep into the forest. She had already started the day's rituals. Laying out the few traps she knew she could do and resting in on a branch high in the trees with her bows and arrows. Just waiting for the game to come by. 

 Katniss had few pleasures left in life anymore. She was jaded and a bit of a cynic with little to really keep her happy. But she had a few happinesses. Prim was one of them. She would live and die for her sister. And hunting was the other. 

Maybe not so much the act of hunting. She was impartial to it, really. It was really just being outside the city for once. Going past the fence was against the law. So was hunting, though. But with the fresh game her and Gale brought back no one was really eager to punish either child for the poaching. And it kept them fed.

So every day since she was about twelve years old, Katniss went out to hunt with her best friend Gale. Or even by herself sometimes. Just a moment alone in the wild. Crouching in trees, setting traps, watching for life. Sometimes she'd be in one spot for hours waiting for game to come by. And that suited her just fine.

Today Gale was busy in town with his family. So Katniss went out hunting on her own. Well, not so much on her own. Since a certain assassin had agreed to join her.

Once she'd walked the length of the snare line, being sure to put all traps in their places she settled high up in a tree with her bow and arrows in her lap, just sort of... lounging really. Waiting. Hoping Henry could find the meeting place. It was a forest, though...

[This is Katniss. In a room. On a train. By herself for a moment.

And she looks pretty broken right now. As she realizes she's going to die soon. And she might have to kill Rue.]